The album is thirty years of somebody's evenings. It is rarely thirty years of money.

What a stamp album is usually worth

Someone's grandfather spent thirty years on that album. You're holding the evenings, the catalogue pencilled in the margins, the tweezers still in the box. None of that was wasted, and none of it converts into money. Those are two separate facts and both are true.

What we can do is tell you which pages are the ordinary ones and which page has something on it. If the boxes only came out of the house last week, start with the first-week checklist before you sort, soak or show anything to anybody.

Why a thick album can still be worth little

Thickness measures patience, not scarcity. An album fills up because the collector could get the stamps, and the stamps were gettable because millions of them existed. Most of a family album is definitives — the ordinary everyday stamps a post office prints by the hundred million — cancelled, hinged in, and identical to the ones in every other album assembled in the same decade.

Age doesn't fix that. A common stamp from 1958 is a common stamp now, because the same enormous print run still exists in the same enormous number of albums. Scarcity had to be there at the start; seventy years of storage can't create it. That's the whole reason the honest answer disappoints so many families, and it's why a page that promises otherwise is usually selling something.

The envelope usually beats the stamp

The term you'll keep meeting

A cover is the envelope a stamp actually travelled on, postmark and all. For many stamps the cover is worth substantially more than the stamp lifted off it, because the envelope carries the evidence: where it went, when, by which route, cancelled by which office. A stamp on its own is a printed square. A stamp on its cover is a documented journey.

Which is why soaking stamps off envelopes destroys value rather than tidying it. It feels like helpful sorting. It's the stamp equivalent of taking a polishing cloth to an old coin, and the instinct behind both is the same one: the urge to make things look presentable is what costs heirs the most money in the first fortnight.

The do-not list for stamps

Three rules. Every one of them gets broken by someone trying to be helpful.

• Do not soak, peel or lift stamps off envelopes. For many stamps the cover, with its postmark and route, is worth substantially more than the stamp alone. Removing the stamp destroys that permanently. Leave the envelope whole, even if it's torn, even if it's grubby.
• Do not use tape, glue or self-adhesive mounts. Any adhesive contact is permanent damage. Even removing an old hinge badly — the small folded paper tab collectors used to fix stamps into albums — can halve the value of a mint stamp, one that was never posted and still has its original gum on the back.
• Do not store them anywhere damp or hot. Humidity makes gum stick and foxing spread. Foxing is the rusty brown speckling that creeps across old paper in damp air, and it doesn't reverse. An attic or a garage will quietly ruin a collection over one summer.

Common version, or the one worth checking

Five things decide whether a stamp is ordinary or interesting. In almost every case the two versions look nearly identical on the album page, which is the difficulty in one sentence.

Anything the collector kept apart

The same goes for an envelope kept whole when every other stamp in the house was soaked off, and for a page of covers filed away from the albums. Photograph those first. If you only take five photographs, take them of whatever was kept apart.

Photographing an album

Two kinds of photograph, and one rule about which comes first.

1. Whole album pages, straight on. Square to the page, in daylight, the full page in frame. The arrangement itself carries information: which country, which era, how densely it's filled, where the gaps are.
2. Close-ups of the three things that matter. Anything pre-1900, anything with an unusual postmark, and any stamp kept separately from the rest.
3. Separated items first, bulk second. A free first look is 5 photographs. Spending all five on album pages tells us the collection is a collection. Spending two on the glassine envelope at the back tells us something we can act on.

How the examination works covers the three passes and why an item we can't pin down comes back with no figure at all rather than a guess.

What you're probably holding

The album collection

Usually the bulk, and usually the disappointment. It's still worth photographing several pages, because the country and era tell us quickly whether there's any reason to look harder. An album of pre-1900 material is a different conversation from an album of 1960s commemoratives.

First day covers

An envelope cancelled on the day a stamp was issued, usually bought as a souvenir. They were sold in quantity to people who intended to keep them, and almost everyone did. That's the problem. They're the most common thing in a stamp estate and, sheet after sheet of them, rarely the valuable part.

US stamps

The same rule holds: era first, then condition. Nineteenth-century issues and early airmail are where value concentrates, and centring does a lot of work there. A twentieth-century album filled from post office counters is bulk, however neat it looks.

A box of worldwide mixture

Bags and packets of assorted stamps from everywhere, bought by weight or by the thousand. Sorting them by hand is a hobby, not a strategy. Photograph a spread of them, then anything that looks older or hand-cancelled, and let the flagged pieces earn the attention.

When a full report isn't worth $39

Often, honestly. If the album is one country, post-war, neatly filled with used definitives, and nothing in the house was kept separately, a free first look on 5 photographs will tell you that, and you can stop there. Paying $39 to hear the same answer in six sections is a bad trade and we'll say so.

The full report earns its fee when there's a real question to settle: several boxes, anything pre-1900, covers with odd postmarks, a stamp kept apart, or an estate being divided between people who need something written down before anyone sells. If the answer is going to be bulk either way, what a dealer, an auction house and eBay each cost you is the more useful page. Selling bulk to a dealer for a single cheque is a legitimate route, and for a lot of albums it's the right one.

Free first look 4 photos · album, 1954–1971

Album pages, one country, used definitivesCommon when collected, common now

Assessed as a lot

First day covers, sleeve at the backStandard issue, standard cancel

Assessed as a lot

One envelope, hand-written route, early dateFlagged: the cover, not the stamp

Worth a professional look

Two stamps in a glassine, kept out of the albumFlagged: the collector separated them

Worth a professional look

Needs an expert No figure is printed where a photograph can't settle one.

What a photograph can't settle

Plenty. A photograph won't count perforations reliably, won't show a watermark, which needs the stamp held against a fluid or a light, and can't confirm that gum is original and undisturbed. Small repairs, thinned paper and re-perforation are in-person findings. So every value we state is a range, never a point, and where we can't identify something well enough we print no number at all — it says “worth a professional look” instead. That's the honest output more often than families expect on stamps.

This page is wrong for two groups. If you already count perforations and check watermarks, there's nothing here for you. And if you need a certified appraisal with a signature on it — an insurance schedule, a contested estate, a charitable deduction, a court — this won't be accepted, because it's an estimate from photographs. Part of the job is telling you which items are worth paying a real appraiser to see. If the estate also has coins in it, what an inherited coin collection is actually worth runs the same exercise on jars and proof sets.

This is an informational estimate from photographs, not a certified appraisal. We tell you what is worth paying an appraiser to look at — we have no interest in buying anything you own. Values are always given as ranges, and where a photograph can't settle it, the report says “worth a professional look” rather than inventing a figure.